Probably the best deal if you're looking for 100GB or 1TB of cloud storage.

"We've lowered the price of our monthly storage plans to $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), [and] $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99)," the company said in a blog post.

When Google introduced Drive two years ago, it offered 5GB for free, 25GB for $2.49 per month, 100GB for $4.99 per month, and 1TB for $49.99 per month. Google boosted the free tier to 15GB last year, and now users can rent much more than a terabyte. 10TB costs $99.99 per month, 20TB costs $199.99 per month, and 30TB costs $299.99 per month.

Google's prices for 100GB and 1TB are impressive. Dropbox charges $9.99 per month or $99 per year for 100GB and $49.99 per month or $499 per year for 500GB. Dropbox for Business must be purchased for at least five users to get more than 500GB.

Box personal accounts provide 10GB for free or 100GB for $10 monthly. Microsoft's OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) offers 7GB for free. An extra 50GB on OneDrive costs $4.49 per month or $25 per year; 100GB costs $7.49 per month or $50 per year; and 200GB costs $11.49 per month or $100 per year.

Google's offer doesn't include discounts for full-year purchases, but the monthly prices are low enough that Google is still cheaper than its major competitors.

Promoted Comments

:/ I've been thinking of Amazon Glacier for long-term storage of some media that I don't want to go through the process of re-ripping and encoding if my original (rips) ever get screwed. Right now Glacier would be less expensive but if the $99 is really for 10TB and up then maybe Drive would be the better way.

Of course with Amazon I have the option of sending them some drives with the data to put into Glacier. With Drive it would be a looooong upload process.

This is the same $/GB as glacier for storage but glacier cost WAY more if you actually need to retrieve something. (I think the numbers from the slashdot story discussion yesterday was $200/month for 20TB but $2,400 to download).

This pricing means Amazon is going to have to lower the cost for glacier retrievals significantly or they'll lose everyone with decent upload bandwidth.

I've been thinking of Amazon Glacier for long-term storage of some media that I don't want to go through the process of re-ripping and encoding if my original (rips) ever get screwed. Right now Glacier would be less expensive but if the $99 is really for 10TB and up then maybe Drive would be the better way.

Of course with Amazon I have the option of sending them some drives with the data to put into Glacier. With Drive it would be a looooong upload process.

No, it's not the best deal. Sky Drive has 100GB storage for real cheap, and the best part is if you do enough Bing searches you get a year subscription free.

OneDrive does 100 GB for $50 a year, which is double the cost of this. Sure, you can get promotions for a year of free space, which is great, until that year is up and you have to either pay for 100 GB or never add anything more to your OneDrive or hope for another one year promotion.

Now if they'd just get a little more serious about security. For that reason I've been tinkering with Wuala and Tresorit lately. I'd suggest Spideroak too but their "rooms" system for sharing files is... unintuitive, to put it mildly.

Use TrueCrypt or your other favorite encrypting utility and go nuts if you worry about your data security. All my data that I'd like to keep private and secure like tax information, serial numbers etc are tossed in an encrypted container and placed on line. Everything else like media I throw up unencrypted.

No, it's not the best deal. Sky Drive has 100GB storage for real cheap, and the best part is if you do enough Bing searches you get a year subscription free.

OneDrive does 100 GB for $50 a year, which is double the cost of this. Sure, you can get promotions for a year of free space, which is great, until that year is up and you have to either pay for 100 GB or never add anything more to your OneDrive or hope for another one year promotion.

$2/month for 100 GB is a pretty awesome cloud storage deal, period.

Then just do more searches to extend your subscription by another year. I don't understand why people hate Microsoft so irrationally. Their cloud storage has good integration with Windows 8 as well as Office Online (which is free and much better than google docs).

I'm still marginally ahead with a legacy $20/year 80GB account, but this closes the gap considerably. I had expected prices to keep going down, so I was somewhat shocked to see them go up so precipitously. Hopefully this is the start of a trend, but I suspect it's just as likely to be predatory pricing.

:/ I've been thinking of Amazon Glacier for long-term storage of some media that I don't want to go through the process of re-ripping and encoding if my original (rips) ever get screwed. Right now Glacier would be less expensive but if the $99 is really for 10TB and up then maybe Drive would be the better way.

Of course with Amazon I have the option of sending them some drives with the data to put into Glacier. With Drive it would be a looooong upload process.

This is the same $/GB as glacier for storage but glacier cost WAY more if you actually need to retrieve something. (I think the numbers from the slashdot story discussion yesterday was $200/month for 20TB but $2,400 to download).

This pricing means Amazon is going to have to lower the cost for glacier retrievals significantly or they'll lose everyone with decent upload bandwidth.

No, it's not the best deal. Sky Drive has 100GB storage for real cheap, and the best part is if you do enough Bing searches you get a year subscription free.

OneDrive does 100 GB for $50 a year, which is double the cost of this. Sure, you can get promotions for a year of free space, which is great, until that year is up and you have to either pay for 100 GB or never add anything more to your OneDrive or hope for another one year promotion.

$2/month for 100 GB is a pretty awesome cloud storage deal, period.

Then just do more searches to extend your subscription by another year. I don't understand why people hate Microsoft so irrationally. Their cloud storage has good integration with Windows 8 as well as Office Online (which is free and much better than google docs).

Who is "hating Microsoft irrationally?" I have a OneDrive account. It's great. I use it to store basically every picture I've taken for the last 5 years. I have over 200 GB between being an early adopter, winning a contest on The Verge, and being one of the first people to log in when they renamed themselves OneDrive.

Just because I don't want to change my search engine of choice to get free cloud storage doesn't mean I "hate Microsoft" - sounds more like someone has a persecution complex surrounding their favorite company. Can you actually confirm that "doing more searches" extends your subscription by a year? The only reference I see to Bing Rewards giving you more OneDrive storage is a one-time offer.

No, it's not the best deal. Sky Drive has 100GB storage for real cheap, and the best part is if you do enough Bing searches you get a year subscription free.

OneDrive does 100 GB for $50 a year, which is double the cost of this. Sure, you can get promotions for a year of free space, which is great, until that year is up and you have to either pay for 100 GB or never add anything more to your OneDrive or hope for another one year promotion.

$2/month for 100 GB is a pretty awesome cloud storage deal, period.

Then just do more searches to extend your subscription by another year. I don't understand why people hate Microsoft so irrationally. Their cloud storage has good integration with Windows 8 as well as Office Online (which is free and much better than google docs).

Who is "hating Microsoft irrationally?" I have a OneDrive account. It's great. I use it to store basically every picture I've taken for the last 5 years. I have over 200 GB between being an early adopter, winning a contest on The Verge, and being one of the first people to log in when they renamed themselves OneDrive.

Just because I don't want to change my search engine of choice to get free cloud storage doesn't mean I "hate Microsoft" - sounds more like someone has a persecution complex surrounding their favorite company. Can you actually confirm that "doing more searches" extends your subscription by a year? The only reference I see to Bing Rewards giving you more OneDrive storage is a one-time offer.

Use TrueCrypt or your other favorite encrypting utility and go nuts if you worry about your data security. All my data that I'd like to keep private and secure like tax information, serial numbers etc are tossed in an encrypted container and placed on line. Everything else like media I throw up unencrypted.

Google drive is file based and not block based, it's also limited to 10GB files.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to upload a 10GB file to google every time I make a change to the encrypted file image.

encfs is the way to go in regards to google drive if you want to be secure, just don't lose those encryption keys!

I prefer DropBox, but I think it's great that there is some real competition on price now.. practically speaking though, anyone who uses significant storage in the cloud can't just hop over to a new service because transferring the data would take significant time. So I'm curious how much that lock-in effect will mitigate a price war.

Besides, anyone who really needs a lot of storage and cares about the price could just sign up for AWS. From what I understand, DropBox is basically a reseller of AWS (plus a better client) anyway.

No matter why you might dislike this...because of Google a lot of the others are going to rethink their price plans - which is a good thing for all of us looking for storage.

Agreed. I've been using Skydrive/Onedrive for years and love it. I'm glad Google has not only matched but beat Microsoft's pricing by a significant amount! I don't expect Microsoft to respond immediately, but I expect them to eventually... Its awesome

Does Apple offer cloud storage? How are their rates and serviced in comparison?

How many consumers will be able to use the 1TB or 10TB options in the face of data caps? How long will it be until Time Warner or Comcast start demanding a surcharge to access cloud storage at reasonable speeds?